This week I was at SPA2009. Possibly one of the best conferences I’ve been to recently. Diverse people with lots of great ideas. There are my highlights.
Coaching Self Organising Teams
This was an excellent session but Joseph Pelrine, full of useful and interesting ideas I hadn’t come across before.
- Behaviour is a function of a Person and their Environment. Thus while we can’t change a person, we can change their environment.
- Thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the popular Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model
- An alternative cooking based model: Solidifying, Congealing, Stagnating, Cooking, Burning
- Understanding Flow, in terms of balancing skills and challenges
- The Cynefin ABIDE model: Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Diversity, Environment
- Social Networking theory
In particular, the ideas around Flow (“the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”) resonated with me. While this is different from the MMF based Flow of Value I tend to talk about, I did find some interesting other parallels for thinking about kanban systems. A topic for a future blog post.
Estimation Fallacy
This was a great goldfish bowl discussion around the value of estimation. A recurring theme was trust. Should we spend our time building trust so that we can rely less on estimation, or should we spend our time getting better estimates because we can’t achieve trust? The output of the session can be found here.
Automated Ajax Testing
This was run by a couple of guys from Caplin, who have an extremely Ajax based Rich Internet Application. They presented their experiences and learning from using Selenium as their automated testing tool. Their conclusions were that, while Selenium isn’t perfect, when used with its Custom Locator functionality, and a UCD/DSL approach to structuring tests, it can be extremely valuable. A good example of a positive, art-of-the-possible approach to automated acceptance testing.
The session also introduced me to WebDriver, which looks like it could have potential as a new emerging automated web testing tool.
Complex Adaptive Systems
Jurgen Apello ran a thought provoking session on “What’s next for Agilists”? He based his assertions on learning from Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), so I found it a useful recap of those ideas. It also generated lots of discussion about whether Agile has already applied CAS ideas, whether there are new things we can learn, or whether the ideas don’t apply at all. The slides can be found on Slideshare.
Haskell
Probably the most popular topic at the conference was functional programming, and in particular Haskell. One keynote, two scheduled sessions, and at least three BOFs. I went to a workshop on TDD and Haskell, and we looked at an approach to testing a Java application, via the Slim framework using Haskell and Model Based Testing. While I didn’t fully understand all the Haskell concepts, and I’m probably not going to start using the approach on a day to day basis, it was hugely eye opening as a different way of approaching a problem. Another example of smart people being creative and practicing the art-of-the-possible.
Lean & Kanban
As well as running my Kanban, Flow and Cadence tutorial, I was asked to help lead a Lean & Kanban BOF which had a really good turnout. We had some interesting discussion and it was nice to see some interest in looking at being successful from a different perspective.
XTC
Finally, there as a special evening event with the Extreme Tuesday Club which involved a panel discussion with some of original XTC crowd. The main point of debate was around how optimistic people were about the future of Agile. Personally, I think there are enough new ideas emerging (e.g. kanban got a mention) and enough people doing great things (e.g. the Selenium and Haskell sessions above) to be optimistic.